Recently, I had a hankering to connect my old Commodore VIC-20 to the internet. Yes, I know, it’s been done before. I’ve even done it before, sort of, using an RS-232 connection to another computer.
But I wanted to skip the reliance on another machine, and see if we could get the wonder computer of the 1980s connected independently. Mostly independently, anyway.
Over a lazy Sunday afternoon, while the family was napping, I put into place an idea that formed in my head mere hours earlier: turn my Commodore VIC-20 into a simple terminal for a *nix box.
I was musing on ways to connect my VIC to other systems, and had recently been playing with Chris Baird’s great little hack of transferring files via serial port from a PC using a simple, 25-line BASIC program. That got me wondering what other ways you could utilize the serial port.
